2021-11-30

An open message to a certain 'makeup' company.

I've been seeing their ads a lot when watching NHL hockey games, oddly enough.

If you're going to advertise a product to make women 'appear' to look younger -

  1. Don't use someone who's clearly had a lot of work done on their face such that it looks bloated and distorted.
  2. Don't show said someone to an old picture of themselves to reinforce point 1. Not that I thought they were attractive back then, but at least they looked young.
  3. And if you're going to advertise that your makeup reduces the 'appearance' of wrinkles on the face, you may want to cover up the someone's upper chest - as it looks borderline skin-cancer like.

Think war has never been about making lots of money for the rich and powerful.

It's as true today as was true for the first conflict - it's always been about profiting on emotions. In this case, war has always been about exploiting anger and converting that into the maximum amount of violence and death possible in the shortest period of time; then repeated over and over.

Normally I don't like referring to corporate-worshiping websites for sources of anything. And there's a ton of 'holier than thou' inferences, most notably in reference to China.

But this is a case where their genuine viewpoint is a truly horrifying and dystopian future world view and worth looking at to get a sense whom and what are the real barriers to saving the planet from climate change. This form of vulture (they say venture; I say vulture) capitalism is it.

And make no mistake - these people really think they're changing the world for the better. Case in point:

“You know, we’re doing it out of greed and avarice, in which lies the hope of progress.”


Really - sports teams can combat climate change?

Ok - it's kind of small and not very impactful -

... analysis estimates that in 2018 the four leagues combined for about 7.5 million kilometres of air travel on 5,655 flights, generating nearly 122,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. However, if travel patterns enacted due to the COVID-19 pandemic were permanently adopted, emissions from team travel would drop by 22 per cent, more than 25,000 tonnes.

But still, it's better than nothing.

Full context: https://www.concordia.ca/news/stories/2021/11/16/sports-leagues-can-fight-climate-change-with-lockdown-era-schedules-concordia-research-shows.html?c=/news/archive

 


2021-11-28

Well this was long overdue.

https://www.nhl.com/canadiens/news/hockey-management-changes-within-the-montreal-canadiens-organization/c-328427508

I mean let's face it - Marc Bergevin has been the GM for the better part of 10 years - what is his legacy?

One (fluke) Stanley Cup Final run in 2021 - the 2nd such run over the last 30 years. Yes they beat the teams they weren't expected to beat, but they never faced many others, nor did they really have a chance against the defending champs.

But getting back to my diatribe ...

Yes he brought in same good players. Yes he's made some controversial - and even questionable - draft choices.

And as Brian Wilde put it, he had some really flawed ways of looking at defensemen ...

Bergevin has never been in the sweepstakes for a blue line puck-mover. He just does not value them. He values who he was as a defender. Bergevin had a long and successful career where he took care of his own end and offered absolutely nothing at the other end of the ice — just like he likes them.

This is never going to change. He will continue to make this blunder. Five years for Alzner; four years for Savard. As much as Bergevin does make good trades, and he does well in contract negotiations, he cannot build a team because he does not value this absolutely vital defender.

Got that right - had he not heard of Doug Harvey?

Granted he's made the same mistakes the last few GMs have made and never invested in a strong sniper who can be counted on the put the puck in the net when called upon. And while the odds of the Habs drafting Guy Lafleur 2.0 are next-to-nil in this day and age, one would think plotting to find them in other teams would be a top priority. That and having playmakers for such a skilled goal scorer would help.

But I honestly think he was really banking on the Habs actually winning the Cup to ensure a contract extension at the end of this year. And he had no real Plan B when that didn't work out. I mean when your captain/top defender and award-winning goaltender go down with injuries (the former is likely permanent, and the latter yet to play a game this season), and you don't really have a strong defensive core to both clear their zone and set up your forwards, you have a season like you have now, which is the worst start in the team's long history.

This season is a loss. Better to start over and really overhaul the team. It may result in some really painful and tough decisions. And to be fair, there is a core of really good players there. 

Time will tell whether the Molson Family truly values winning a Stanley Cup over simply making money year after year.


Got the updated Blogger app on my mobile phone.

Still can't figure out how to add Labels I can see when on a PC.

They used to be accessible on the phone many app versions ago.
 
 
Of course, I'm still forced now to authenticate my identity w/Google on said phone.

Very succinct summary of what a certain movie franchise has both 1) always been; and 2) what's it's become.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/no-time-think-changing-geopolitics-international-blockbusters/5759429

2021-11-25

On this day, I reflect on many things.

On this land where millions of brown and black people were indentured, tortured, assaulted, brutalized and murdered, it's good to see at least one person gets justice.

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/11/23/arberys-killers-the-logic-of-slave-patrols/

Let's hope those found guilty get lengthy prison sentences.

2021-11-24

Hey look where democracy ACTUALLY takes place? Venezuela!

So naturally the Empire Establishment of Corporation Domination objects!

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/11/23/venezuela-socialists-win-elections/

A reminder to all the 'liberal Democrats' - your purported lesser of two evils is no different than - and serves the same corporate donors as - Donald Trump.

And just as corrupt -> https://21stcenturywire.com/2021/11/23/confirmed-biden-family-syndicate-helped-chinese-secure-cobalt-deal/:

Cobalt mining in Africa is known to be a dirty industry. UNICEF estimates that out of the estimated 255,000 Congolese mining for cobalt, at least 40,000 are children, some as young as six years old (pictured above), and who handle toxic material with their bare hands. Many of these cobalt miners are working for less than $2 per day.

Incredibly, much of Hunter Biden’s brazen foreign influence peddling took place while Joe Biden was serving as US Vice President under Barack Obama.

Depending on the 2022 midterm election results, this latest exposure could eventually trigger a special prosecutor called by Congress to fully investigate the true extent and ramifications of the Biden Family syndicate’s international business dealings.

Along with previous reports of pay-to-play activities in Ukraine and in China, details in this latest story paint a familiar picture – of a family syndicate that is ready to use its political clout in order to cash in on lucrative deals, while also exposing themselves and a future Biden White House to coercion and blackmail from an endless string of former business partners and associates

'Full Spectrum Dominance' in its correct context.

White supremacy that is.

https://blackagendareport.com/delusional-commitment-doctrine-full-spectrum-dominance-leading-us-and-world-disaster

... this is a cold-blooded criminal class that is ruthless and still dangerous. We must not forget this fact. The destruction of Libya, wars in Syria and Yemen, subversion in Ethiopia and Haiti, coups, illegal sanctions and the outrageous interventions into the internal affairs and electoral processes in Nicaragua and Venezuela are just some of the actions that bear out the destructive power of the U.S. With its rulers’ consciousness and worldviews infused with the psychopathologies of white supremacist ideology, the drive to maintain global “Full Spectrum Dominance ,” a grotesque, bipartisan doctrine that commits the U.S. to aggressive counters to any real or imagine threats to its global or regional economic and political dominance, reflects more than just a strategy for continued bourgeois economic and political hegemony. It takes on an existential character because for the ruling class, “whiteness” and dominance are naturally interconnected and serve as the foundation of their identity.

2021-11-21

When all is said and done, and some other species in the universe - who understand living beings on this planet better than we do - discovers this blog post ...

... they'll know that at least one person can tell them why the human races went extinct along all others -

It was our system of government and distribution - capitalism.

In capitalism lives don't matter, only their labor and services do; as they are commodities to exploit for endless profit.

Short-term profit for a few over long-term survival for everyone.

2021-11-18

$319 000 000 given to various media, by the Gates Foundation.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/revealed-documents-show-bill-gates-given-319-million-media-outlets/5761976

Why? 


Gates, who amassed his fortune by building a monopoly and zealously guarding his intellectual property, bears significant blame for the failure of the coronavirus vaccine rollout across the world. Quite aside from the COVAX fiasco, he pressured Oxford University not to make its publicly-funded vaccine open-source and available to all for free, but instead to partner with private corporation AstraZeneca, a decision that meant that those who could not pay were blocked from using it. That Gates has made over 100 donations to the university, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, likely played some role in the decision. To this day, fewer than 5% of people in low-income countries have received even one dose of COVID vaccine. The death toll from this is immense.

Unfortunately, many of these real criticisms of Gates and his network are obscured by wild and untrue conspiracy theories about such things as inserting microchips in vaccines to control the population. This has meant that genuine critiques of the Microsoft co-founder are often demonetized and algorithmically suppressed, meaning that outlets are strongly dissuaded from covering the topic, knowing they will likely lose money if they do so. The paucity of scrutiny of the world’s second-richest individual, in turn, feeds into outlandish suspicions.

Gates certainly deserves it. Quite apart from his deep and potentially decades-long ties to the infamous Jeffrey Epstein, his attempts to radically change African society, and his investment in controversial chemical giant Monsanto, he is perhaps the key driver behind the American charter school movement — an attempt to essentially privatize the U.S. education system. Charter schools are deeply unpopular with teachers’ unions, which see the movement as an attempt to lessen their autonomy and reduce public oversight into how and what children are taught.

You want to know the reason why our planet is headed towards suicide.

It's the rich and powerful who use capitalism to see to it.

Think I'm kidding?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11/18/cop26-capitalism-death/

Capitalism turns everything – everything! – into a commodity.  In the same process that it turns human work into labor power, of enabling people to sell themselves as they would sell any other object, capitalism turns nature into yet another commodity.  Jason Moore, in “Rise of Cheap Nature,” notes, “the condition of the rise of capitalism, in other words, was the creation of Cheap Nature.” He adds, “But Cheap is not free.” In this process, humans increasingly became non-animal, ever-less natural beings.

Over the last few centuries, capitalist plunder has been of sugar and cotton and textiles as well a coal, iron and oil.  It has been the plunder of workers, slaves and the indentured.  It is evident in the transformation of the global landscape — deforesting of the rain forests, industrial farming and super-suburban sprawl; in the endless mining for gold, coal and jadeite; in the innumerable oil spills, oil-tanker collisions and mine explosions. And it is evident in the increase in global warming, number of storms, rising sea level, draughts, loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification water pollution and the depletion of the ozone layer.

 Want more?

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/17/acri-n17.html

The relatively stable two-party system inaugurated in the early 20th century has endured, with some minor challenges, until fairly recently. The American working class has remained politically disenfranchised, failing to build mass parties as happened in Europe and elsewhere.

This can be ascribed in part to the remaining resources of US imperialism, as the leading global capitalist power. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was able to pose as the “friend of labor” and steal the political thunder of fascistic figures like Huey Long.

Even more decisive, however, was the crisis of working-class leadership, and above all the role of Stalinism, in systematically betraying the working class internationally. In the US, the Stalinists were crucial in helping to tie the insurgent labor movement to Roosevelt’s Democrats, and in the post-World War II period the anticommunist trade union bureaucracy, basing itself on the temporary postwar boom, took over the task of strangling the movement of the working class.

The last four decades, however, have witnessed a fundamental change. Everywhere the existing parties and trade unions—including the Stalinists—have been transformed and integrated into the capitalist state. Racial politics, in the form of the identity politics embraced by the Democrats, has supplemented racism and xenophobia as a means of dividing the working class. The accelerating crisis and decline of American capitalism has led, especially since the stolen election of 2000, to new and more extreme attacks on basic democratic rights.

This is part of the explosive growth of inequality, a Second Gilded Age even more extreme than the first. This level of inequality is not compatible with rights that have been won or tolerated in the past. This is the significance of the emergence of Trump, the ongoing transformation of the Republicans into a fascist party, and the complicity and bankruptcy of the Democrats in the face of the fascist danger.

Those that have money and power today - they likely won't be alive in 10-20 years. So they won't care if the tipping points alluded to in a previous blog post come to pass.

It doesn't matter to them - they think of everything as a form of competition where you win if you have the most money and power at the end. But it's that end that will destroy us all.

Bonus:

One of the quirky perks of crapitalism is how it enables right-wing/psychopathic institutions like the CIA to wage war on actual journalists: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/11/17/files-australian-julian-assange-prison/

 

 

2021-11-11

Something about this day (November 11th) that's been twisted into an establishment narrative, glorifying war.

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/11/11/promoting-world-peace-not-glorifying-war/

What this day was originally about:

Over one hundred years ago, in 1918, the world celebrated peace as a universal principal. The first World War had just ended and nations mourning their dead collectively called for an end to all wars. Armistice Day was born and was designated as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated.”

 What it's become:

 

After World War II, the U.S. Congress decided to rebrand Nov. 11 as Veterans Day. Honoring the warrior quickly morphed into honoring the military and glorifying war. Armistice Day was flipped from a day for peace into a day for displays of militarism.

https://www.veteransforpeace.org/take-action/armistice-day

 

 

2021-11-10

I wonder.

Google sent me an email indicating that I need to validate my signing into my account now with the additional step of entering a PIN sent to my mobile phone.

Oddly enough other Gmail accounts I know of didn't get a similar directive

As well other people I know didn't get a note like that either.

I wonder if it has anything to do with blog?

2021-11-07

Something I've realized over the last little while.

The majority of films has the skills and plots of a soap opera, and the excitement of a contractual obligation.

2021-11-06

Surprise surprise - no media coverage.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/06/pers-n06.html

Of the many conclusions and recommendations, this one was key -\

One of the central lessons of the October 24 webinar was that the fight to end the pandemic requires close collaboration between the international working class and the scientific community. 

2021-11-04

Once more - with feeling - Russiagate was a psy-ops operation perpetuated to deflect attention away from the DNC, Hillary Clinton campaign, and establishment media colluding to fix the 2016 DNC Presidential Primary.

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/11/04/4-years-later-nyt-says-steele-dossier-turned-out-to-be-democratic-funded-opposition-research/

This is weird - the modern micro cybernetic organism?

https://www.concordia.ca/news/stories/2021/11/03/concordia-researchers-develop-a-tool-to-neutralize-chemical-weapons-using-rare-earth-elements.html?c=/news/archive

Concordia researchers develop a tool to neutralize chemical weapons using rare-earth elements

Researchers at Concordia are studying the potential applications of a type of compound called metal–organic frameworks (MOFs). They have designed a new kind of microscopic structure that can rapidly mitigate chemical weapons when exposed to ultraviolet light.

MOFs are artificially created hybrid networks of metal clusters bound to each other by organic linkers called ligands. They are usually open-faced and porous, sometimes described as sponge-like. They are extremely versatile, depending on the kinds of materials involved, and they can be used in a wide variety of applications from water remediation to drug delivery.

 

I predict however, the weapons corporations and the violent will get their hands on this and a way to turn this into a terrible, destructive entitiy.

 

Update to an earlier image - I like this one better.

It came somewhere from here.

 

https://ikigai-living.com/what-is-ikigai/